Saturday, August 26, 2017

Shadowboxing, Chapter 7: Amy Opines

The next
morning, when we’d finished filling out the online crime report form – Roy
ended up having to take the lead, typing in half of my responses for me when I
shamefully but not surprisingly wilted before the challenge of, for example,
enumerating physical descriptions of the gang of four – I felt a sudden jolt of
superstitious fear. Everything that had happened since I’d met Roy had been so
improbably good that I had the sudden
conviction that signing off on this would bring it all to a close, seal off the
freak outgrowth of space-time that had allowed us to briefly coexist.

(The back of
my mind also observed, helpfully, that it was likely that I was once again
using this imagined crisis as a distraction from attempting to reckon with the
men in the alleyway.)

As Roy and I
kissed good-bye at the threshold of my front door, the question is this the last time formed itself
clearly in my head, sent a chilly wave of unease through me; my back contracted
uncomfortably, tilting me back and to the right. I felt as if I couldn’t look
him in the eye, either. I think he noticed, too, because a look of puzzled
concern crossed his face as he stood up. He said nothing, though. After he’d
headed off down the sidewalk, with his rolling, ground-eating gait, I cursed
myself bitterly for wasting the moment.

But it
wasn’t the last time. Over the next couple of weeks, we met up two, three, four
more times – sometimes in the city, sometimes at my place. Every time, I still
didn’t quite believe that he was real, that he would show up – couldn’t believe
it until I saw his shape filling up my doorway, the shy grin that slowly grew
on his face as he saw me, too.

It wasn’t
always easy to align our schedules since, on top of working days that often
exceeded 10 hours, Roy often worked weekends, too. I learned that in addition
to projects with the landscaping business he regularly contracted with, he took
on home contracting projects of his own, especially as the winter came on. But
it helped immensely that his energy seemed inexhaustible. One night he came
over for dinner after working – he later admitted – from 6 AM to past 6 PM that
day, yet still he seemed as keen and restless as ever. It also helped that he
had a car, which meant that he at least was less dependent on bus schedules and
the vagaries of accessible cabs.

Once or
twice, I offered to go over to his place instead, but he reacted with a vague,
uncomfortable demurral. I thought over his reaction several times, and couldn’t
help taking it to mean both that his apartment wasn’t accessible, and that he
was embarrassed that that was the case. But really it could have been a lot of
things: was he a secret slob, for example? I had to catch myself before I
tumbled too far down the dizzying path of “what would that mean if we lived
together…”

On nights
when we couldn’t see each other, we quickly fell into a habit of – to my great
surprise – phonecalls. It didn’t surprise me that Roy wasn’t much into texting,
used it for only the most perfunctory communication (emails likewise), but it
did surprise me, all things considered, that he’d prefer calls over texts. Quietly
I slotted it away with the assemblage of the other little preferences and
quirks that continued to shape my impression of him as being strangely
old-fashioned, courtly.

It didn’t
take long for me to realize that being on the phone actually made his speech
more fluent, at least with me. (I wondered if he found eye contact and all the
other feedback of face-to-face speech overwhelming.) Not that phonecalls made
him any more talkative, by any stretch of the imagination, and I wasn’t
comfortable just monologuing at him, as much as he seemed to enjoy it, so we
often shared little more than a “hey,” a quick exchange of impressions from our
days – for him, often a bit of tricky engineering he was proud of having pulled
off, or an amusing/exasperating client – and a closing “good night.”

But it felt
warmer and more genuine than texting, I found; I often felt afterwards as if I
had been hugged, and went to bed smiling to myself. I savored the phrases he’d
passed onto me, the comfortable rumble that his voice sank to when he wasn’t
bothering to project at all.

“You’re
looking peppy lately,” my coworker Francis remarked to me, maybe ten days out
from when I’d met Roy. A burly guy about my age, with a shaved head and a beard
magnificent both in its density and redness, he sat across from me in our
shared working space. “Lotsa smilin’, good viiiibe…” Francis wasn’t actually
from California, but had gone to a UC for undergrad, and had never lost the attitude.

“Oh geez,”
was all I could say at first, embarrassed. I leaned forward and rubbed my hand
through my hair, partially shielding my face from him.

I laughed
and rolled my eyes. “You know me and the workouts. No, I…” I paused. “I’m
seeing someone and it’s going well, actually.” Normally at work I was reserved about
my private life, but I didn’t feel like I could come up with a convincing lie
at the time; nor did I want to. It wasn’t hard for me to admit to myself that
really, I wanted to tell everyone
about Roy. Knowing that Francis was a talker, but not a gossip, helped.

Francis
inclined his head, made a “respect, brother” kind of facial expression. “Congrats,
dude. Glad to hear it. Keep killin’ it.” He didn’t ask for further detail; I
bobbed my head and said thanks; he returned his attention to his work.

Given that
we were a youngish software company, everyone tripped over themselves to be
progressive, and I’d certainly dropped strategic hints about my sexual
orientation on occasion, but I didn’t feel secure enough in either my level of
out-ness or the duration of my relationship with Roy to start going into detail
just then. Even though I trusted Francis, unlike a decent number of others at
the company I knew, to be above immediately instigating long sessions of
speculation about how exactly a gay dude with one working limb could do it with
another dude. God! The thought made me nauseous.

***

That
weekend, Amy and I had lunch together, at her place. When I rang her doorbell, she
was so eager to see me that even from outside I could hear her stomping across
the kitchen floor. The door opened; Amy’s face, haloed with her short, bouncy,
coppery-bright curls, practically blazed with excitement; her pale green eyes
looked electric. “Asher!” She leaned on one of her forearm crutches and let the
other hang as she bent to give me a hug. “Hey, Legs,” I said happily into her
shoulder.

Amy and I had
met at a summer camp for teens with CP and other muscle disorders, when I was
just about to go into senior year of high school, and she had just finished
hers. Her family had just moved to the area, and had enrolled her in the camp
to help her feel more at home, even though she’d be leaving for college in a
few months. For my part, I’d been attending the camp since the beginning of
high school, and had made a number of good friends there – most of whom I was
still in touch with, even – but no one had clicked like Amy and I had. It was
like fire meets fire, in a good way: we were both hyperanalytical chatterboxes,
so we could bounce off of each other and make abstruse jokes for hours. We kept
a notebook we called “The Laboratory,” detailing thought experiments we’d “run”
together, convoluted alternative endings to favorite movies, national economies
based on monetization of low-probability weather events, that kind of thing. Even
in retrospect it still made me laugh more out of genuine amusement than out of
embarrassment at how clever we thought we were.

Like me, Amy
had spastic CP, but only her legs were affected, and though her knees and feet,
too, were contracted, she was quite mobile and could stomp around beautifully
with braces and crutches – hence my nickname of “Legs” for her. I had briefly
been “Wheels,” not surprisingly, but somehow it didn’t stick. Part of it was
that “Legs” suited Amy in more way than one – she was really quite gangly,
would have been taller than me if I could stand up, which added to her general
air of expansive, breathless, slightly madcap energy. Being around her made me
feel as if I’d just had a shot of espresso.

“Asher,” she
said pleadingly as she led the way inside, pausing to use one crutch to knock a
stray pair of boots out of the path, “I’ve been so good.”

“You have been so good,” I said, laughing. “I
think you sent me only like fifty more question marks yesterday.”

“I could
have sent you fifty-one, or used up all of your data with huge GIFs of cats
falling over or something. So, am I
going to get to hear more about this guy today? What you’ve told me so far is
like barely more than what Google told me, which is that… he has a 4.75-star
rating on a home contracting site.”

“You Googled
him?!” I was mortified.

“Come on, that’s
just common sense nowadays – I’m serious,” she said, turning to glare at me
when I laughed incredulously, “it’s an obvious safety measure.”

“Okay,
okay.” I had Googled him myself, of course, but still felt chastened by the
lengths to which Amy was going to look out for me.

Dinner was
already on the table – Indian take-out, since Amy was far from domestic. We set
to without any formality. “If you got out more, you’d be more savvy about this
stuff,” she said reprovingly, peeling open a tinfoil packet of naan. “It’s
embarrassing for you when you work in
web services.”

“Yeah, well,
this year was supposed to be my big coming-out, and we all know how that went.”
I had told her about no-good James
from Grindr, and she was well informed on all the dead ends that had preceded
him; collectively she deemed them shitheads. I grimaced at her both
illustratively, and because my legs were starting to spasm, pushing my feet
against the footplates and my hips out of my chair, straining against my
seatbelt. “But yes, anyway, I promised, so I will tell all tonight. Or at least most.”

“No, all!”
Her eyes glinted devilishly.

I turned my
attention from my legs, operating as usual according to the laws of another
dimension, in order to pick up my fork and point it at her, while delivering a
quelling glare.

And then,
over the course of dinner I did tell
her pretty much all – more than I’d told myself I would; I couldn’t help it, I
wanted to share with Amy, knew that she would help me puzzle it out, put things
in a new light, resettle the pieces back into myself, with affection and
enthusiasm.

The most
glaring omission I made: I did not tell her about the men in the alleyway. Even
though it was Amy, even though Roy had close to literally hand-held me through
the crime report, I still felt as if I couldn’t even talk to myself about what had happened. The
thought of having to hold someone else’s anger, horror, anything, was purely
overwhelming. (Likewise – despite our weekly phonecalls, I still hadn’t been
able to tell my parents, which filled me with shame.) So, Roy made a vaguer,
less extravagantly dramatic, but still serendipitous entrance onto the scene as
someone I “just met” on my way home after the disappointing James-date.

Still, I
told her a lot about Roy. Not everything, not the details about him that felt
so precious and intimate that I couldn’t bear exposing them, as much as part of
me wanted to shout them to the world, like how he looked when he was sleeping. But
I tried to share with her the outline, the silhouette of him I was slowly
filling out in my mind – his intensity, his habitual solitude, his sometimes
bewildering sweetness, his preference for physical expression.

On this last
point, Amy was fascinated. “I admit,” she said, leaning back in her chair – we
had finished eating by that point – “I never imagined you with, like, He-Man.”

“I know!
Isn’t it bizarre?”

“Not in a
long-term way, at least,” she continued. I restrained myself from asking her
whether she thought we had long-term potential, because I didn’t want to hear
the answer. She was staring up at the ceiling with her hands behind her head, a
slight frown crinkling her long, pale brows. I rubbed my right hand and wrist
anxiously, pressed back slowly against the contracture, then slid my hand down
to press against the tension in that elbow.

Amy sat up
again and looked directly at me. “And you guys haven’t done anything yet?”

I knew what
she meant. “No. Is that weird, two weeks in?”

“It’s not
just ‘two weeks in,’ but you’ve been seeing each other a lot during those two weeks. – Not even like, just a little bit of
fooling around? I know you smooch and spoon a lot –” I grinned involuntarily,
and she smiled, the distinctive lines around her eyes deepening, “ – but nothing
handsy?”

“No,” I
admitted. Roy had never gone further than the massage he’d given me on the
first night he’d come over – but I dearly wished he would.

There had
been times, many times, when I’d been tempted to start something, but in those
moments I might as well have lost all remaining motor function; I shrank inside
myself, nervous, overwhelmingly conscious of my inexperience, and of my
imperfect, ungraceful body. Next to mine, Roy’s body seemed to burn with
potency.

I had woken
up one morning to see him already awake and shirtless in the hallway, bouncing
lightly from foot to foot, staring fixedly ahead at, I realized, his reflection
in the bathroom mirror. His fists were raised. He darted back and forth, his bare
feet weaving an intricate pattern on the floor, making soft scuffing noises; he
ducked once, then threw a quick volley of punches at an invisible opponent. He
was shadowboxing, I realized, a term that had never had physical meaning to me
before.

He looked
perfect, like a wild animal. Pure capability, pure motion. For some minutes I
watched him in silence, until my arm started spasming, thudding my wrist
against my chest, bringing me back to myself, and to a fuller realization of
what I looked like, next to Roy.

“Okay,” Amy
said, looking at me seriously again – I pulled myself out of that memory, out
of the self-pity – “there are a ton of things that neither you nor I know here,
which makes it hard for me to say what might be weird or not. But here’s my
take. I do think it’s unusual, given
how you say he looks and acts, the physical energy, that he hasn’t tried to move
things forward with you. The fact that he probably
hasn’t been with a disabled guy before, I have to assume that’s making him more
cautious, it can’t not.

“There’s
also the fact that you undoubtedly read to him as inexperienced. Sorry, babe,
you know it’s true.”

“Guilty as
charged.” I raised my hand. “Or, you know, virginal.”

“So, that’s
two big reasons not for him to go in, uh, guns blazing, as it were.” She paused
so we could both make retching faces at the double entendre, before she sobered
up again. “And it does make me like
him that, from what you’ve said, he’s been bending over backwards to be
respectful in that regard.

“But I think
one thing you need to keep in mind is, he could be seeing other people. I’m not
saying he is! But it could be the case.” I’d known she was working her way up
to a difficult point, but my stomach still sank at the suggestion, and my legs
stirred again. The phrase “getting it elsewhere” flashed through my head, the phrase
she’d been too diplomatic to use. She paused for a little while to let me work
through my thoughts, before saying, “And, you know, it would be fine, right now, if he were seeing other people,
because it’s not like you guys have discussed anything about that yet. Right?”
I shook my head in confirmation; I admitted to myself that the need hadn’t even
occurred to me. “But I just – I want you to be ready to protect yourself if you
have to, Asher, emotionally.”

I thought
for a while longer, trying to ignore my still-misbehaving legs, which were now “jogging”
against my footplates. I tried to take the good Amy was offering – her brand of
sensible, sardonic steeliness – and set aside the defensive hurt, the skittering
anxieties. I looked up at her. “I’ll try to keep my eyes open. Thanks, Amy.
You’re the best.”

Finally she
smiled again, and blew me a kiss from across the table. “Have fun. Play safe.
And pleeease make sure I get to meet him if things roll along much further.”

I hurried to
agree, and after that she gently disengaged from the subject, moved toward
lighter chat; I followed her gratefully, though part of me would have liked to
pepper her with a dozen anxious questions.

After
dinner, she walked me to the door without her crutches. “Hey,” I said indignantly
as I followed her, “you never even gave me time to ask about you and Akshay.”
Akshay was her boyfriend of over a year; the last update I’d received suggested
they were getting quite serious, more serious than was habitual for Amy.

“Now you
know it feels to want the juicy, juicy deets and not get, babe,” she said over
her shoulder as she lurched the last step to the door, catching herself with
one hand before shuffling back slowly to pull the knob open. I wondered if
things had gone awry, hoped they hadn’t; her evasiveness could mean a lot of
things, like she didn’t want to talk about it because it was getting serious. As straight-shooting as she was,
Amy could be remarkably enigmatic about her own business. She continued, one
eyebrow raised, “Dinner, your place, next week?”

“It’s a
deal,” I said as I rolled out. “Thanks again, Amy. Really.”

“Make good
decisions!” she yelled as I pulled out onto the sidewalk. It was pleasantly
crisp outside, with a half-moon rising in a sky of a vibrantly deep blue. It
was the first of November. I had a lot to think about.

8 comments:

Oh my, I love Asher's relationship with Amy. This story is becoming a how-to guide for supportive and responsible friendship and open communication in relationships. With super hot illustrations. I 100% approve of all of it.

Haha, I love Amy! She's a good friend, I'm glad Asher has her, to caution him a bit and speak the uncomfortable truths.And that illustration. Holy Valentine :D I need a very detailed description of that scene. Like, very detailed. Please? :)

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This blog contains erotic and romantic stories featuring disabled male love interests. If you would like to contribute a story or would like to be a regular contributor, email me at paradevo(at)yahoo.com.